But do they? Oxide targets the enterprise, and people there don't care that much about how the underlying OS works. It's been ten years since a RHEL release started using systemd and there has been no exodus to either Windows or Illumos.
I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.
Exactly, then why would they be dragged into systemd-or-not-systemd discussion? If you want to use Linux, use either Debian or the CentOS hyperscaler spin (the one that Meta uses) and call it a day.
I am obviously biased as I am a KVM (and QEMU) developer myself, but I don't see any other plausible reason other than "we know the Illumos userspace best". Founder mode and all that.
As to their choice of hypervisor, to be honest KVM on Illumos was probably not a great idea to begin with, therefore they used bhyve.
FWIW, founder mode didn't exist five years ago when we were getting started! More seriously, though, this document (which I helped write) is an attempt specifically to avoid classic FUD tropes. It's not perfect, but it reflects certainly aspects of my lived experience in trying to get pieces of the Linux ecosystem to work in production settings.
While it's true that I'm a dyed in the wool illumos person, being in the core team and so on, I have Linux desktops, and the occasional Linux system in lab environments. I have been supporting customers with all sorts of environments that I don't get to choose for most of my career, including Linux and Windows systems. At Joyent most of our customers were running hardware virtualised Linux and Windows guests, so it's not like I haven't had a fair amount of exposure. I've even spent several days getting SCO OpenServer to run under our KVM, for a customer, because I apparently make bad life choices!
As for not discussing the social and political stuff in any depth, I felt at the time (and still do today) that so much ink had been split by all manner of folks talking about LKML or systemd project behaviour over the last decade that it was probably a distraction to do anything other than mention it in passing. As I believe I said in the podcast we did about this RFD recently: I'm not sure if this decision would be right for anybody else or not, but I believe it was and is right for us. I'm not trying to sell you, or anybody else, on making the same calls. This is just how we made our decision.
Founder mode existed, it just didn't have a catchy name. And I absolutely believe that it was the right choice for your team, exactly for "founder mode" reasons.
In other words, I don't think that the social or technological reasons in the document were that strong, and that's fine. Rather, my external armchair impression is simply that OS and hypervisor were not something where you were willing to spend precious "risk points", and that's the right thing to do given that you had a lot more places that were an absolute jump in the dark.
I would agree with that. Given the history of the Oxide team, they chose what they viewed was the best technology for THEM, as maintainers. The rest is mostly justification of that.
That's just fine, as long as they're not choosing a clearly inferior long term option. The technically superior solution is not always the right solution for your organization given the priorities and capabilities of your team, and that's just fine! (I have no opinion on KVM vs bhyve, I don't know either deep enough to form one. I'm talking in general.)
I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.